Bloody Trail

by Ford Fargo

  Beneath it—in red calligraphic painting—the same thing was more mysteriously, and more impressively, written in Chinese:

  中国洗衣店

  A bell jangled as Logan pushed open the door and found himself in the steamy atmosphere. Through the steam, he could see Jing Jing, the Li family’s pretty daughter, standing behind a counter talking to a young woman with corn yellow hair wearing a blue bonnet.

  “Why, Doctor Munro, what a pleasant—” began the young woman before spotting his blood stained shirt.

  “Miss Haselton, this is an unexpected pleasure, meeting you again so soon. Did you enjoy your supper with Bill Torrance at Isabella’s Restaurant last night?”

  Ann Haselton was the local schoolteacher. Her cheeks suffused with color, and Logan immediately felt he had spoken out of turn. He could see that she was embarrassed, which was rather endearing. Most folk had sensed that she had set her sights on Bill Torrance, the enigmatic owner of the Wolf Creek Livery Stable. He decided that an immediate change of conversation was called for.

  “But shouldn’t you be getting to the schoolhouse for the start of lessons?” he asked as he put his bag down on the floor and took off his hat.

  “Oh, Mister Sublette the headmaster is going to look after both classes this morning—at least until I get back. He will be happy to talk to them for hours about his fossils and old bones,” the teacher explained with a smile. “You see, I arranged to walk the four Li boys to school today. Mrs. Li has made some banners with Chinese writing on them for our school concert. The children in my class are making puppets. After we leave here with the banners, the boys and I are going to Mrs. Miller’s dress shop to pick up some remnants so we can make costumes, then we’ll drop in to see if Joe Nash has finished making the puppet theatre for us. Our next stop will be the Wolf Creek Expositor. David Appleford said he would help us print some handbills. These strong Li boys will be able to carry everything between them.”

  “I will get them, Miss Haselton,” said Jing Jing with a little curtsy. “I apologize for their lateness. My father would scold them if he saw how they have kept you waiting.”

  Once she had gone, Logan and Ann Haselton passed some further pleasantries without any further mention of Bill Torrance. Without going into details about the birth of the Blunkett twins, Logan explained how his shirt had gotten so covered in blood.

  The door behind the counter opened, and Jing Jing returned, followed by three progressively smaller boys all dressed in neatly-pressed blue tunics, just like hers.

  “And here is your laundry order, Doctor Munro,” she said, handing him a basket with the Li’s Chinese Laundry sign neatly attached.

  “Thank you, Jing Jing. But what do you think about this?” Logan asked, taking off his jacket. “Will your father be able to clean the blood off this shirt?”

  Before she could reply, there came the sound of a youngster singing cheerfully, then a fourth Chinese boy appeared, a full head shorter than the next smallest. It was Chang, the Li family’s youngest child. He took one look at Logan’s gory chest, then screamed in wide-eyed horror.

  “Aiyee! Murder!” he cried. “Somebody hurt the doctor!”

  His face went pale and his eyes rolled upward as his legs seemed to crumple beneath him. He was only stopped from falling and bumping his head by Ann Haselton’s quick movement.

  Logan immediately helped her to lay the boy down, much to his older brothers’ glee.

  “Chang is a baby!” said one of his brothers, and the others began to giggle.

  “Hush! Hush!” came a sharp voice from behind the counter, and Mrs. Li appeared. She was dressed in a tunic with a large apron. In her gloved hand she held a heavy flatiron. Her eyes widened in alarm as she saw her son on the floor, with the teacher and the blood-splattered town doctor leaning over him. She lay the flatiron down and quickly knelt beside them, her face concerned. “So sorry, Doctor Munro and Miss Haselton. My little Chang very sensitive.”

  Logan cursed himself for being the cause of the child’s faint. He knew Chang well, having delivered the boy himself not long after he first settled in Wolf Creek. Chang had always been a frail, nervous child, but his smile was infectious and everyone liked the little fellow.

  Suddenly, a small white mouse popped its head out of the top pocket of Chang’s tunic. It wrinkled its nose and looked from side to side, then made a dash for freedom. It was followed by another from a pocket in his pants.

  Ann Haselton saw them and immediately jumped up and backed into a corner, tugging on her skirts as she did so. She gasped in horror.

  “We will get them, Miss!” cried one of the brothers, and together, the boys scuttled about, giving chase to the mice.

  Logan ignored them. Her opened his bag and pulled out a bottle of smelling salts, then wafted it under the boy’s nose. Almost immediately, Chang’s eyes flickered and his nose wrinkled as the salts did their job. Logan prudently pulled on his coat to cover his shirt.

  As Chang started to come round, Logan chided himself. Poor child! What a fool he had been to show the blood-soaked shirt when youngsters were around. No little kid should have to see a mess of blood like that. And certainly, not a sensitive boy like Li Chang. Especially not on a beautiful morning like this.

  Yet, although the sight of blood had caused Chang to faint, the experience did not bother him. He sat up and grinned at the sight of his brothers pursuing his mice. “Give them to me!” he cried as two of his brothers presented them to him by their tails. “Not like that. They don’t like it.”

  “Chang likes his animals. I think he likes them better than his brothers sometimes,” Mrs. Li said with a shy smile. “Sorry if the mice upset you, Miss Haselton.”

  The teacher recovered herself and shrugged her shoulders with embarrassment. She turned to Logan.

  “You—you won’t say anything to Bill Torrance about me being frightened of mice, will you, Doctor Munro? He loves animals and he might think I was just a silly woman. I can’t help it, but mice just make me squirm.”

  Logan smiled and shook his head. “Not a word from me. A breach of confidence would be against the Hippocratic Oath.”

  ****

  After a change of shirt and a breakfast of bacon and eggs washed down by several cups of coffee at Ma’s Café, Logan had opened up his office and settled down at his big roll-top desk to await his first patients of the day. Ordinarily, he would see about twenty or so in the morning before setting off on a walking round of Wolf Creek and Dogleg City. Later on, he would head out of town to visit the ranches or homesteads as needed.

  While he waited, he looked over his notes for the monograph he was writing, The Use of Tincture of Love Vine (Clematis virginiana) in the Treatment of Gonorrhea, Gleet and Chancre in a Kansas Cowtown.

  He glanced over at his medicine mixing table with its myriad of bottles of colored liquids, jars of powders, pestle and mortar and the small vat which he used to prepare the tincture that, so far, had proven to be at least as efficacious in treating venereal disease as the standard treatment with mercurial ointment.

  “I wonder how many ladies of the night or their clients I’ll be treating today?” he mused.

  His mind strayed back through time, to other offices and past patients of other races. And inevitably, as his gaze wandered over the walls to his framed degree and his citation for the Crimean and Turkish Medals from the Crimean War, and to the picture of Helen and himself on their wedding day in Lucknow, surrounded by his comrades from the British East India Company Army and Helen’s lady friends, he felt the old pangs of loneliness and desolation. He relived the attack as he and Helen had returned to Lucknow one evening during the early days of the Indian Mutiny. Helen screaming and clutching her young charges to her while he emptied his Beaumont-Adams revolver into three turbaned, charging rebels. He had saved her from that, but not from the malaria that followed the cholera outbreak among the surviving garrison.

  He reached for his meerschaum pipe and stuffed tobacco into its
bowl from his battered, old oilskin pouch. A smoke would calm his nerves.

  ****

  Emory Charleston mopped his brow with a kerchief, stuffed it into the back pocket of his canvas trousers, then put the last hard heft on the axle wrench to the left rear axle nut, and that job was done. He pulled the kerchief from his back pocket and again mopped the sweat off his wide forehead and the back of his thick neck.

  All the iron tires had been retightened and axel stubs replaced on farmer Derrick McCain’s dray, but now it would be good for at least another year’s bouncing along rutted roads with a two thousand-pound load of corn or other produce aboard. As was his custom, Emory meandered completely around the wagon, carefully checking all the fittings, secretly admiring his work. It had only been ten years that he’d been out of the fields, doing the work of a free man.

  Thanks to Mr. Lincoln, it was no longer necessary for him to worry about not having manumission papers—which he’d never had, as he’d earned his freedom ten years ago by applying the hard hickory handle of a hoe to the back of overseer Augustus St. Germain’s almost equally hard head, then outrunning a dozen Louisiana redbone hounds for two days and a night until he could launch himself into a roiling over-the-bank Mississippi. The river’s condition had saved him, as it made him a very hard follow—all riverside roads were awash belly deep, impassable even to a horsebacker. By the time St. Germain’s kinfolk could launch boats, Emory was miles downriver—munching fruit, coasting along in the high water astride an uprooted apple tree, as comfortable as baby Moses had been in that reed basket.

  His woman and knee-high girl child both dead of the yellow fever, there was nothing but fear to hold him to his masters, and he’d managed to quell that emotion long ago. And hearing that slaves were being freed, or hot-footing it for freedom all over the south, he decided to take his leave of the slave life.

  He’d been three months finding his way back upriver, all the way up the Mississippi to the Missouri, then up it to Kansas, where he strode west, thinking California a fine destination. But he settled into Kansas, where there seemed to be lots of work for one willing. He made friends with other folks of color and even a few not, and soon learned whom to befriend and whom to fight shy of. And after years there doing odd jobs, dodging Redlegs up to and even after the great war of rebellion was over, he’d heard of work to the south in a booming railroad town. Work there came to him by way of a blacksmith who only seemed to judge a man by the amount of work he could do—even though the smith had worn General Lee’s colors. Emory could work like two men, and stayed on with Angus “Spike” Sweeney.

  He’d never looked back after putting that hickory to good work alongside the overseer’s head-bone, except for many times during the war while watching for border ruffians and slave catchers.

  As fate would have it, his new overseer soon came to be his partner—although they didn’t advertise it about town. Work and pay had gotten short, so Emory worked on for a share. There were many who’d take great umbrage with a man of color being partner to a white man, particularly to one who’d worn the butternut and fought with the Davis Guards. Emory and Angus had long ago agreed not to discuss the relative merits of gray and blue, nor their financial association. It was an easy chore as Angus Sweeney, known as Spike to his friends, hardly said a word to anyone about anything. He was silent as an iceberg, and some thought as cold, but Emory knew better. He knew Spike well enough, after years of bending hot iron elbow to elbow and shoeing knot-headed horses shoulder to shoulder, horses who’d as soon kick you into next week. He knew a better friend couldn’t be found—white, black, yellow or brown. Spike Sweeney had something engraved into a timber over the door to the shop, something that came from the South—in fact, it was reputed to have been engraved on General Lee’s sword. Strangely enough, it was something Em believed with heart and soul…Help Yourself and God Will Help You.

  Em had few friends in Wolf Creek. Many of the newer town folk were southern sympathizers and thought little of any man of color, whereas most of the citizens who had lived there longer had been the sort of Unionists who had opposed the enslavement of black people on principle, but didn’t necessarily want to be seen speaking to one on the street. At least Emory knew where he stood with the Texan cowboys and assorted ex-Rebs. Most of the blacks in town at any given time, on the other hand, were migrant cowboys or railroad workers. Sometimes Em shared a drink with George Alberts, who’d also escaped slavery and now owned the leather shop, at Asa’s saloon down in Dogleg City—but that was a very rough place. Asa’s patrons, generally, were not the sort of company Emory preferred to keep. Em’s best friend, Charley Blackfeather, was half-black, and half-Seminole, and Charley didn’t spend a lot of time in town. But he, like Angus ‘Spike’ Sweeney, was a friend to have, and Em would hate to have either of them as enemy. They’d both proven many times they could be fearsome to their foes.

  Satisfied with his work, Emory moved across the shop to a scuttlebutt and scooped up a ladle full of cool water, drank it dry, then ladled up another and poured it down the back of his neck. Felt damn good, as his thick neck was knotted from throwing around five foot high rear wagon wheels. He looked to where his partner worked, thinking he’d take him a ladle of the cool drink, but Angus was concentrating on the fine work at hand, and Emory knew he wouldn’t want to be interrupted.

  Emory smiled to himself. Angus was equally his tall, but only half his weight. Where Emory’s arms were the size of many a man’s thigh, Angus was long and lean for a smithy—but those arms were strong as oak hogshead barrel staves. Where Emory was a mite slow to move, a plow horse, Angus was a racehorse; where Emory was slow to anger, Angus had a short fuse. They made good partners in many ways, even if Angus was a bloody Rebel, a Texican, and an Anglican converted to Lutheran.

  Emory had only worked under Angus’s tutelage for a short while before he figured that Angus had fought, in what many Southerners called the “recent unpleasantness,” for family, honor, and home, and not for the sham-honor of one man owning another. Even Angus’s father had not condoned the owning of slaves—if Angus could be believed, and Emory had yet to find him to exaggerate, much less lie—and had given many a Negra his manumission. Most of those men had stayed on the Sweeney farm, working harder than they’d ever worked as slaves. Some even saved enough to buy relatives from slave owners, with Nigel Sweeney, Angus’ father, acting in their stead as purchaser. The father had come from the old country, and Scotland and England had outlawed slavery decades ago. It had taken a while to worm that out of the quiet-spoken Angus, but after a year or two of working together, with Emory as an employee, Emory came to understand him and even admire him. And when Angus fell on hard times, Emory worked for beans and bacon, shared with Angus out of the same pot. They both used the same privy and washbasin, and both slept in the shop. Em worked until he had enough back wages coming to buy into the place in lieu of receiving the cash, luckily just before the business turned. It gave Emory a flush of pride when he thought of it; he had taken the chains off his own feet, and was now part owner of a forge, not only a free man but a blacksmith and a farrier (Angus was forever reminding customers that the two are not the same—blacksmiths work iron, farriers shoe horses.)

  It did niggle at him that Angus always wore that damn Confederate kepi, with some fancy medal attached above its eyeshade. One of these days, Emory was going to slip it into the forge, and it would no longer be a bone of contention. Of course, he’d remove the medal first, as Angus seemed to put great stock in the piece of brass.

  Emory turned his attention to a wagon tongue that needed its fittings re-welded.

  ****

  Angus looked over and smiled to himself. He knew it would have taken him another two hours to finish the dray wagon had it been him rather than Em doing the work; damned if Em wasn’t getting to the point he could outwork the senior partner. That was a hell of a note, but then he could have worse trouble. In fact, it was music to his eyes and ears.

  To
Angus Sweeney, the generally perceived lone proprietor of Sweeney’s, the ring of a four-pound hammer on anvil, swage block, or mandrel was as beautiful as the melody he once heard emanating from the stage door of the Opera House in St. Louis. Of course, he’d just finished off a bottle of Black Widow hooch and was face-down in the alley at the time, but the strains from the violins and cellos, and the voice of a Jenny Lind imitator who was a Nightingale in her own right, stuck in his mind to this day. But, to be truthful, it was his own music he preferred even over that heard through the back door—his was the music of good honest work, and resultant tires, barrel hoops, shovels, hoes, axes, and rigging that would outlast any who didn’t mistreat them. Iron on iron, ringing in regular four-four time, was the echoing melody of a man’s sinew, muscle, and bone—making hard metal bend to his will.

  At the moment, he was busy on the mandrel. He’d formed a half-dozen cinch keepers and was now forming the circular side as the iron was cooling after being welded into the rough shape that would serve to bind latigo to saddle after George Alberts, the saddle maker, stitched them in place on one of the fine saddles he made. Before he’d started on McCain’s dray, Em had just completed rebuilding some hinges on Albert’s draw-down table, and Albert was eager to get back on the saddles and get them shipped off. This was fine work, as fine as that of a tinsmith, not the bone-jarring pounding necessary for forming wagon tires or ax heads or railroad spikes, which he often had done for miners who wanted ore car rails snaking into the holes they cut into the mountainside. In fact, that was how he got his nickname, Spike. He’d worked sixteen hours a day for a good long while, fulfilling a contract for a thousand such rail spikes, much to the chagrin of others who wanted some work out of him. They thought it a derogatory name, but he kind of liked it.

  The mines were a place he hoped he’d never have to work. He hated the thought of living his life in a rat hole as much as many hated the thought of working hammer and tongs next to white iron while a forge at your back hiked the temperature in the shop well above the hundred-degree mark, even when the horse troughs outside got a shimmer of ice on their surface from a Kansas norther. But he should never have to become a mine rat, as his business was doing just fine, enough to support both himself and his partner. And he liked fire and iron.